patriarchy, power, and pay: the transformation of american
TRANSCRIPT
†Correspondence should be directed to: Steve Ruggles University of Minnesota, 50 Willey Hall, 225 19th Ave S., Minneapolis, MN 55455 e-mail: [email protected], phone: 612-624-5818, fax:612-626-8375
Patriarchy, Power, and Pay: The Transformation of American Families, 1800–2015
Steven Ruggles † Regents Professor, History
Director, Minnesota Population Center University of Minnesota
September 2015
Working Paper No. 2015-3
Abstract
This article proposes explanations for the transformation of American families over the
past two centuries. I describe the impact on families of the rise of male wage labor
beginning in the nineteenth century and the rise of female wage labor in the twentieth
century. I then examine the effects of decline in wage labor opportunities for young men
and women during the past four decades. I present new estimates of a precipitous decline
in the relative income of young men and assess its implications for the decline for
marriage. Finally, I discuss explanations for the deterioration of economic opportunity and
speculate on the impact of technological change on the future of work and families.
1
Introduction
Before the nineteenth century, most families were organized according to patriarchal
tradition. Household heads owned and controlled the means of production, and their wives
and children were obliged to provide the unpaid labor needed to sustain family enterprises.
Masters of the household had a legal right to command the obedience of their wives and
children—as well as any servants or slaves—and to use corporal punishment to correct
disobedience (Coontz 2005; Cott 2009; Hartog 2000; Mintz and Kellogg 1988; Shammas
2002; Siegel 1996; Stanley 2002). Over the past two centuries, this patriarchal family
system collapsed, as household heads lost control over their sons, wives, and servants.
<Figure 1 about here>
The waning of patriarchy was accompanied by a shift toward simpler and more
unstable family structures. Intergenerational coresidence, once a standard phase of the life
course, is now rare (Ruggles 1994, 2007). As shown in Fig. 1, in the mid-nineteenth
century, 74 % of persons aged 65 or older resided in multigenerational families.
Coresidence declined continuously from 1850 to 1990, reaching a low point of 18 % before
recovering slightly during the past few decades.1 After the Civil War, divorce rates began
to climb. Except for a temporary spike at the end of World War II, divorce has increased
almost continuously for 150 years. New estimates controlling for age composition
1 Except where otherwise specified, statistics in this article derive from the Integrated
Public Use Microdata Series (Flood et al. 2015; Ruggles et al. 2015). In many cases, the
analyses also appear in Ruggles (forthcoming), which includes additional documentation of
sources and methods.
2
presented in Fig. 2 show that the standardized divorce rate leveled off only briefly in the
early 1980s and has climbed rapidly since (Kennedy and Ruggles 2014).
<Figure 2 about here>
In the past half-century, the long-run trend toward atomization of families has
accelerated. A broad retreat from marriage began after 1960. It is likely that about one-
third of persons now in their early 20s will never marry, and this trend shows no sign of
slowing (Martin et al. 2014; Ruggles forthcoming).2 This is unprecedented; as shown in
Fig. 3, among all prior cohorts, at least 90 % of women married. Cohabitation is growing
rapidly, and cohabiting unions are more unstable than marriages (Kennedy and Bumpass
2008; Kennedy and Ruggles 2015). Increasingly, however, young adults are forgoing
partners altogether. In 2014, 54 % of persons aged 25 to 29 had no coresiding partner of
any kind, up from 48 % in 2007 and about 23 % in 1970.3
<Figure 3 about here>
This article presents an interpretation of the transformations in American families
over the past two centuries. I argue that more than anything else, the changes in families
reflect changes in work. An upheaval in the economic organization of families had
2 Martin et al. (2014) projected that assuming current marriage rates remain unchanged,
31 % of women and 35 % of men born in 1990 will not have married by age 40.
3 The 2014 and 2007 estimates come from the Current Population Survey (CPS), adjusted
to account for group quarters (Flood et al. 2015). The 1970 estimate derives from the
census microdata, adjusted to account for cohabitation (Fitch et al. 2005).
3
profound implications for gender and generational relations. The economic revolution was
responsible for revolutions in family composition, divorce, and marriage.4
I begin with a broad overview of changes in family economies over the past 200
years. I then describe the rise of male wage labor beginning in the nineteenth century and
the rise of female wage labor in the twentieth century, and examine the implications of
those changes for family relations. The second half of this article explores a decline in
wage labor opportunities for young men and women during the past four decades. I
present new estimates of the precipitous decline in the relative income of young men and
assess its implications for the decline of marriage. Finally, I discuss explanations for the
deterioration of economic opportunity and speculate on the impact of technological change
on the future of work and families.
Family Economies
For most of the nineteenth century, production was carried out by families. In 1800, three-
quarters of the workforce was engaged in agricultural work, and a majority of the
population lived on farms until 1850 (Ruggles et al. 2015; Weiss 1992). Farms could not
operate without family labor; all family members who were old enough contributed to farm
production. Among the one-quarter of the population who did not work on farms at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, most still made their living through the family
economy. Most nonfarm production was carried out by family businesses, with occupations
4 This analysis is confined to the United States because it is presently the only country with
a suitable long-run data series. Similar processes, however, occurred in Northern Europe
and now seem to be occurring in some East Asian and Latin American countries (Ruggles
2009; Stanfors and Goldscheider 2015).
4
such as shopkeeper, shoemaker, tailor, physician, or tavern keeper. In most such
enterprises, the family resided on the same premises as the shop, and the whole family
worked for the business. Like farms, these family businesses were usually handed down
from generation to generation.
<Figure 4 about here>
Figure 4 describes the major transformations in the economic organization of
married-couple households over the past two centuries.5 In the nineteenth century,
corporate families predominated. I define corporate families to include all married couple
households with self-employed heads, except for those in which the wife had an
occupation outside the family business. Most corporate families were farm families. In
addition to kin, corporate families often included farmhands, servants, slaves, and
sometimes apprentices. Corporate families were in the majority throughout the nineteenth
century and remained important through the first half of the twentieth century.
Corporate families were replaced by male breadwinner families in the early
twentieth century. Male breadwinner families are defined as those in which the husband
works for wages or salary and the wife has no occupation listed in the census. By 1920,
the number of male-breadwinner families exceeded the number of corporate families, and
this percentage continued to grow until World War II. This change was driven by
expanding wage labor opportunities for men. The male breadwinner category represented
5 This graph was inspired by a similar illustration that appears in Stanfors and
Goldscheider (2015). The term “Corporate Family Economy” was coined by Ryan (1981),
and my characterization of change was informed by Mintz (1998).
5
a majority of marriages for just four decades—from 1920 to 1960—reaching a peak of 57
% in 1940.
Male breadwinner families were replaced by dual-earner families in the mid-
twentieth century. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the number of married
women working for wages began to increase, and the pace of change accelerated in the
middle decades of the century. Dual-earner families have now predominated for almost a
half-century. Over the past several decades, female-breadwinner families—shown in the
top right of Fig. 4—have emerged as a significant new form, and they now account for one-
tenth of marriages.
The Rise of Male Wage Labor
How to keep boys on the farm and induce them cheerfully to choose
farming as their occupation for life is a question of deep interest to many
parents. The stampede of young men from the country to cities and large
towns is not an evil which finds its limit in the domestic circles which they
leave, but is one which extends through society and makes its depressing
influence felt everywhere. How to check this evil is a question of great
importance and is well worthy of consideration. (Read 1884:848) Corporate families predominated in the nineteenth century because before the
Industrial Revolution, people did not have many other options. The earliest data showing
the full male occupational distribution come from the 1850 census, when the
transformation of the economy as already well underway. As shown in Fig. 5, wage labor
jobs that paid enough to support a family were still scarce in 1850. At that time, about two-
thirds of men were self-employed farmers or proprietors, unpaid sons on farms or in family
businesses, or slaves. Another 15 % were unskilled workers, who were mostly farmhands:
wage laborers who were paid mainly in the form of room and board. Such laborers usually
did not get paid enough to get married. In 1850, the biggest groups of skilled workers and
6
operatives were miners and sailors. They were paid better than farmhands, but they
worked in places where there were few women available to marry. If a young man wanted
to marry, his best prospect was still to inherit the family farm or business. Accordingly, in
most families, one child remained in the parental household under the control of the
patriarch, with the expectation of eventual succession.
<Figure 5 about here>
As the century progressed, new high-paying opportunities arose in factories. The
number of factory jobs grew 600 % between 1850 and 1900, and there were rapidly
expanding opportunities in clerical, sales, and professional occupations (Lebergott 1984).
The growth of well-paying wage labor jobs for men undermined the economic
underpinnings of patriarchal authority. As young men took jobs off the farm, they moved
away from home and out of the control of the patriarch. Figure 6 compares the percentage
of men in agriculture with the percentage of elderly residing in multigenerational families. A
generation after agricultural employment began to decline, multigenerational coresidence
followed suit.
<Figure 6 about here>
The decline of multigenerational families occurred mainly because of increasing
wage labor opportunities for the young (Ruggles 2003, 2007). When young men could
obtain well-paying employment for wages, they no longer had as much incentive to remain
at home under the control of their fathers. As wage earners grew old, the incentives for
intergenerational coresidence declined further. Under the wage labor system, patriarchs no
longer needed the labor that their sons and daughters once provided. Moreover, retired
wage earners could no longer offer the younger generation employment and eventual
inheritance of the family farm or business.
7
A second major consequence of the rise of well-paying male jobs was a long-run
decline in marriage age, especially among men. Under the corporate family system, young
men had to wait until they either inherited a farm or built up sufficient resources to
establish an independent household. Under the wage labor system, men could achieve
high earnings early in life. As jobs paying good wages began to open up in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men could increasingly afford to marry at an
earlier age. Accordingly, between 1890 and 1960, age at first marriage declined 3.6 years
among men and 2.2 years among women (Ruggles forthcoming).
The rise of male-breadwinner families empowered young men, but it did not do
much for women. Even though first-wave feminists obtained the vote in 1920, in most
respects, patriarchal gender norms remained firmly entrenched. In the mid-twentieth
century, women still could not get a bank account or a loan without their husband’s
signature, husbands had the right to determine where the family lived, and patriarchal
authority was still enforced through violence (Coontz 1992, 2005; May 1990).
In 1958, the New York Mirror—then the second-largest circulation newspaper in the
nation—featured man-in-the street interviews asking the question, “If a woman needs it,
should she be spanked?” All four of the men interviewed affirmed that the spanking of
wives was necessary to enforce discipline. Teddy Gallei, a parking lot attendant,
explained, “It teaches them who’s boss. A lot of women tend to forget this is a man’s
world.” William Davis, a toy factory owner, concurred: “Most of them have it coming to
them anyway. If they don’t it will remind them how well off they are . . . An ounce of
prevention is worth a pound of cure” (Aidala 1958a).
8
The Rise of Female Wage Labor
Patriarchal control over women began to erode with the rise of female wage labor. Wage
labor opportunities for men were highly limited in the mid-nineteenth century, but the
opportunities for women were virtually nonexistent (Kessler-Harris 1982). Figure 7 shows
the occupational distribution for women since 1850.6 In the mid-nineteenth century, the
great majority of working women were unpaid workers in family enterprises, mostly farm
wives and daughters and slaves. The next largest category—unskilled workers—was
almost entirely domestic servants in 1850. The best jobs available for women were in
factories, which employed 1.3 % of women. The tiny professional and managerial
category—accounting for less than 1 % of adult women in the mid-nineteenth century—
consisted almost entirely of teachers. The growth of better-paying jobs for women began
around 1900 and expanded rapidly after WWII.
<Figure 7 about here>
The long-run pattern of women’s employment shown in Fig. 7 is U-shaped, and the
low point of the U was at the peak period for male-breadwinner families (Goldin 1995).
Although the great majority of women engaged in economically productive work in the
nineteenth century, that economic role did not afford them independence or power. In all
but a tiny fraction of cases, nineteenth-century women worked in corporate families under
the direction and control of their husbands, fathers, or masters.
6 The white space at the top—labeled “Not in the labor force”—identifies women without
identifiable economic activities, whose effort was probably devoted mainly to housework
and childcare. Housework and childcare clearly have economic value (Folbre and Nelson
2000), but do not enable economic independence.
9
The twentieth-century rise of wage labor for women undermined the authority of
husbands and fathers. New economic opportunities enabled some women to delay or
forgo marriage, and the availability of paid work also provided a means of escape from bad
marriages. From 1880 to 1990, there was a strong spatiotemporal association between the
availability of jobs for women and the prevalence of divorce and separation (Ruggles
1997). In times and places where women had no means of subsistence outside corporate
families, they usually remained married even if they were unhappy.
<Figure 8 about here>
Figure 8 shows the wage labor participation rate for women aged 25–29, a group
old enough that few were still in school, but they were still of marrying age. By 1920, most
young single women had wage-paying jobs. The percentage of young married women with
such jobs grew gradually from 1900 until 1962 and then took off.
Before the 1950s, women generally left wage labor employment when they married,
partly because most employers barred married women from working for wages (Goldin
1991a). Despite the symbolic resonance of Rosie the Riveter, emergency work experience
during World War II had little impact on employment after the war (Goldin 1991b). Most
economic historians agree that the main reason for the sharp rise of married women’s
employment in the 1950s was the extraordinary demand for labor, which created pressure
to overcome institutional barriers to change. The economy heated up just as the marriage
boom reduced the supply of single women, so the rules against hiring married women
disappeared (Costa 2000; Cotter, Hermson, and Vanneman 2001; Goldin 1990;
Oppenheimer 1970).
As more and more married women began to work for wages, the balance of power
within marriages shifted. Many men and some women were alarmed by the rise of the
10
dual-earner family. A second 1958 New York Mirror man-in-the-street interview asked, “Is
Father Losing his Place as Head of Family?” Charles Cogswell, a bank guard, responded:
Yes. Too many wives are getting independent. They go to work and begin
feeling they have more to say than the father. The old-fashioned way—when
father was THE boss—kept families happier. Not so many divorces,
separations, and juvenile delinquents, then.
Simon Golos, an attorney, agreed that there was a “confusion of authority” and “a gradual
usurpation of power by the lady of the house.” Two women were also queried by the
Mirror. Harriett Weisman, a housewife, agreed with Cogswell and Golos, but felt that the
decline in the power of the father was a good thing because the wife “copes with all the
family problems.” Only Mrs. Lillian Ciarvino—a housewife and secretary—disagreed,
saying that “a majority [of fathers] are still heads of their homes.” Even Ciarvino, however,
recognized that a fundamental change in gender relations was underway, but she saw it as
an issue of character: “The father who gives up his place as head is either weak or doesn’t
care to assume the responsibility.” (Aidala 1958b:27).
Attitudes
Attitudes toward married women’s work shifted rapidly during the 1970s. The evidence on
the timing of change suggests that the transformation of attitudes represented an
accommodation to the new reality of married women’s wage labor (Rindfuss et al. 1996).
Figure 9 compares the percentage of married women who were in the labor force with the
percentage of married women who disagreed with the idea that women should stay home.
In 1970, when the series of attitudinal surveys began, 44 % of wives were already in the
workforce, but less than 20 % of wives thought that women should work outside the home.
Among working wives in 1970, 70 % thought that it would be “much better for everyone
involved if the man is the achiever and the woman takes care of the home and family”
11
(Westoff and Ryder n.d.). The great majority of working wives felt that wives ought to stay
at home. The cognitive dissonance between behavior and attitudes was soon resolved,
however. As married women flooded into the paid workforce, the stigma that had
surrounded married women’s participation in wage labor quickly disappeared. By 1980,
most married women approved of married women’s work (Smith et al. 2013).
<Figure 9 about here>
When behavior changes, attitudes adjust. As divorce became more common, for
example, it lost much of its stigma. This mechanism operates at the individual level; in a
study of divorce in the Detroit area between 1962 and 1977, Thornton (1985) found that
when people get divorced, they become much more accepting of divorce. Likewise, Axinn
and Thornton (1993) found that young people’s cohabitation experience in the Detroit Area
Study had dramatic effects on their approval of cohabitation, and also positively affected
their mothers’ approval of cohabitation.
Changing attitudes are a crucial part of the process of family change. There is a
feedback loop: as family attitudes shift, they allow still more family change (Axinn and
Thornton 2000). Changing attitudes can have especially powerful effects on family
behavior through their impact on institutional change (Bumpass 1990). Over the past 150
years, for example, shifting attitudes permitted progressive loosening of once-formidable
legal barriers to divorce (Cherlin 2009; Hartog 2000; May 1980; Mintz 1998). Similarly,
shifting attitudes helped eliminate legal barriers to contraception and abortion in the 1960s
and early 1970s (May 2010). Women’s control of their own fertility led to a marked decline
in unplanned pregnancies, which in turn contributed to delayed marriage and childbearing,
increased educational attainment among women, and rising female labor force
participation (Akerlof et al. 1996; Bailey 2006; Goldin and Katz 2002; Myers 2012). Thus,
12
attitudinal change enables institutional change, which in turn affects family behavior. The
massive long-run changes in family behavior of the past 200 years could never have
occurred without fundamental changes in attitudes about family behavior.
We should not, however, view attitudinal change as the initial stimulus of family
change. For family change to occur, traditional values must be overcome. Attitudes are
ordinarily a barrier to change, not a cause of change: there must be a source of exogenous
pressure for people to reject the values with which they were raised. Between 1800 and
2000, that pressure was exerted by an economic revolution. The rise of wage labor, first
among men and then among women, catalyzed family change by disrupting traditional
patterns of authority. When families began to change, attitudes followed. The decline in
multigenerational families occurred a generation after the rise of wage labor for men. The
shift in attitudes about married women’s work outside the family occurred significantly after
the rapid ascent of married women’s wage labor. In both cases, rise of wage labor
undercut the economic control of the patriarch, shifting power from old to young and from
men to women.7
Change in the U.S. Census reflected the transformation of family relations. In 1970,
patriarchy was embedded in the census: the form asked each respondent to identify the
household head, just as it had for the 18 previous censuses. The household head was
always the man, and the spouse of the head was always the wife. Thanks to the
7 Some theorists argue the opposite, maintaining that that both family change and married
women’s employment resulted mainly from the rise of individualistic values (e.g.,
Lesthaeghe 1983, 2010; Van de Kaa 1987). I discuss this interpretation in Ruggles
(forthcoming).
13
coordinated efforts of feminist social scientists, by 1980 the household head was
decapitated and replaced by the gender-neutral “householder” concept (Presser 1998).
Either husband or wife could be listed as the householder, and either could be listed as the
spouse of the householder (Ruggles and Brower 2003). Initially, all but a few respondents
maintained the traditional order of enumeration even though the rules had changed; in
1980, just 4 % of married householders were female. That percentage has grown steadily,
and by 2013, women represented 39 % of married householders (Ruggles et al. 2015).
The Decline of Marriage
The classification of family economies based on the economic activities of husbands and
wives—corporate, male breadwinner, and dual-earner—makes sense for the nineteenth
century and the first half of the twentieth century, when the great majority of households
were headed by a married couple. In recent decades, however, the dominance of the
married-couple household has receded, and it makes less and less sense to classify family
economies based on the economic activities of married couples. Figure 10 shows the
percentage of households without a married couple from 1850 to 2013. For the first 100
years, the percentage of households with no married couple grew slowly, from 16 % in
1850 to 21 % in 1950. After 1960, young people began delaying or forgoing marriage,
sometimes cohabiting but more often residing alone or with children but without a partner.
Simultaneously, remarriage rates dropped, and the growing divorced and widowed
populations increasingly opted for solitary residence. By 2012, the majority of households
no longer included a married couple.8
8 Rising cohabitation can account for less than one-fifth of this overall change; in 2013, 44
% of households included no couple at all, either married or cohabiting (Flood et al. 2015).
14
<Figure 10 about here>
Structural factors are responsible for the boom and bust of marriage. As shown in
Fig. 11, age at first marriage declined steadily from 1890 to 1930 as well-paid male wage
earners acquired the means to marry earlier in life. The Great Depression led to a slight
uptick in marriage age between 1930 and 1940. After World War II, median age at
marriage fell sharply to about 20 for women and 22 for men in 1960. During the past half-
century, age at first marriage has increased rapidly, and today Americans are marrying at
later ages than ever before. The marriage boom of the postwar period was fueled by the
rapid expansion of men’s wages, and the decline of young men’s wages since 1975 is the
main reason for the retreat from marriage in that period (Carbone and Cahn 2014; Cherlin
2014; Oppenheimer 1988, 1994).
<Figure 11 about here>
The three decades after WWII were a golden age of wage labor for young men. The
availability of labor was sharply constrained: immigration had been restricted since 1924,
and fertility levels during the Great Depression were the lowest that had ever been
recorded, meaning the new cohorts entering the labor force were small. The “Lucky Few”
entering the labor force after the war saw a spectacular rise in wages (Carlson 2008).
Figure 12 shows the median wages for 25- to 29-year-old men and women in 2013 dollars.
The top panel shows the medians for full-time wage and salary workers; the lower panel is
the same, but includes the entire population aged 25–29, not just full-time wage earners.
Median income for full-time employed young men more than doubled in the postwar era, to
a peak of $48,500 in 1973. After that peak, young men’s wages declined 26 % to $36,000
15
in 2013. Wages for full-time working women went up too, but not as rapidly. Women’s
wages peaked in 2004, but by 2013, they were lower than they were in 1973.9
<Figure 12 about here>
Focusing on median wages for full-time wage and salary workers understates the
decline in the earning power of young men. More and more young men are working part-
time, and a growing percentage are not working at all. As a result, if we look at all men
aged 25–29 shown in the lower panel of Fig. 12—not just the full-time wage earners—
median wages declined 44 %, from a peak of $41,000 in 1973 to just $23,000 in 2013.
Women do not register in the lower panel until 1968 because that was the first year that
more than one-half of 25- to 29-year-old women were in the wage labor force. The median
wages for all women age 25–29 peaked in 2001 and then fell 24 % over the next 12 years.
9 Figures 12–14 are inflated to 2013 dollars using the Consumer Price Index Research
Series (CPI-U-RS), which was designed to address concerns that the standard Consumer
Price Index for all urban consumers (CPI-U) exaggerates inflation, especially in the late
1970s (Stewart and Reed 1999). If I had instead used CPI-U, the decline in young men’s
wages would have been even greater (32 % for full-time workers and 48 % for all men
aged 25–29). Both CPI series, however, may actually understate inflation as experienced
by young adults in the 1970s and 1980s: young adults spent a high proportion of their
income on rent; and before 1987, the CPI seriously understated rent inflation (Crone et al.
2006; Gordon and Van Goethem 2007). CPI-U-RS is available only for the period from
1978 to the present; to inflate the earlier years, I calculated the ratio of CPI-U-RS to CPI-U
in 1978, and used it to adjust the CPI-U from 1940 to 1977.
16
Young men’s wages have been dropping rapidly for four decades. By comparison,
during the Great Depression, wages declined for just a few years before they started
heading back up. No such sustained decline in wages has previously occurred in the
United States. The sharp decline of young men’s wages provided strong incentives for
married women to enter the workforce even after opportunities for women stagnated in the
mid-1970s: for many couples, two incomes were essential for economic survival (Bianchi
1995; Oppenheimer 1994).
Easterlin (1966, 1987) argued that the salient threshold in marriage decisions is not
the absolute level of income but relative income, defined as the income of young men
relative to expectations they formed in their parental home. Figure 13 provides a simple
measure of relative income: income of young men relative to the income of men of about
the same age a generation before. This number is calculated as the ratio of median total
income of all men aged 25–29 to the median total income for the same age group 30 years
earlier, when their fathers were approximately aged 25–29.10 The horizontal line at 100 in
Fig. 13 shows the point at which the older and younger generations made the same
amount. In 1961, young men were making four times what their fathers had made at about
the same age. For the past three decades, the younger generation has consistently done
10 Median generation length for men ranged from 27.8 in 1970 to 32.2 in 2013 (Ruggles et
al. 2015). To estimate incomes before 1939, I assumed that annual changes in income for
young men were proportional to annual changes in the mean income of the bottom 90 % of
the population excluding capital gains, as estimated by Alvaredo et al. (2015). Accordingly,
the early decades shown in Fig. 13 should be viewed as approximate.
17
worse than their fathers. Overall, generational relative income dropped a stunning 80 %
since its peak in 1958.
<Figure 13 about here>
We can also assess income of the young relative to the income of the affluent.
Figure 14 compares the median income of young men with the average income of the top
1 % of the population. This measure peaked in 1970, when 25- to 29-year-old men were
making about 12 % as much as the average income of the nation’s elite; by 2013, this
statistic was down to just 2.6 %.
<Figure 14 about here>
Both of these measures of relative income fit the timing of the marriage boom well.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when young men were doing exceptionally well in terms of
relative income, marriage age was exceptionally young. For the past four decades, relative
income has declined sharply, and marriage age has been rising at a record pace.
How much family change since 1960 can be explained by the drop in the relative
income of young men? To address that question, I carried out a demographic
decomposition, following the Das Gupta (1978) framework.11 The dependent variable is
the percentage of 25- to 29-year-old men who were currently married, with spouse
present, between 1960 and 2013. This measure went from about 75 % of young men living
with a spouse in 1960 down to 24 % in 2013—a drop of 50 percentage points. This
dramatic change mainly reflects decisions to delay or forgo marriage, but it also is affected
by the rise of divorce and separation and the decline of remarriage.
11 The analysis used the open-source DECOMP software (Ruggles 1989).
18
In the decomposition exercise, I analyzed four components of change, described in
Table 1. The left two columns show the percentage of men aged 25–29 who were married
in each category of each component. Foreign-born young men are excluded because the
relative income measure is not valid for them.
<Table 1 about here>
The first component is relative income, defined as the income of men aged 25–29
divided by the median income of men the same age 30 years earlier. I pooled the 1960
and 2013 data sets, calculated relative income as a percentile, and classified each case
into deciles of the combined data set. As shown in the left two columns of Table 1, there
was a close linear association between decile of relative income and marriage in both
periods, with more than four times as much marriage in the highest decile as in the lowest.
The right two columns describe the sea change in the distribution of relative income during
the past half-century.
The second component is occupation.12 In both periods, the men with craft
occupations were most often married. These jobs—carpenters, machinists, mechanics,
painters, and plumbers—have declined dramatically since 1960. The occupational groups
least often married in both periods were the service workers and laborers, and their
frequency has almost doubled.
The third component is employment characteristics, combining information on class
of worker and employment status. Self-employed young men were disproportionately likely
12 The occupational classification is based on the first digit of the OCC1950 variable in
IPUMS; the decomposition categories correspond to OCC1950 codes 0–99; 100–399;
400–499; 500–599; 600–699; and 700–970 (Ruggles et al. 2015).
19
to be married in both years, possibly because self-employment is still often a family
enterprise. These jobs were already uncommon for young men in 1960, and by 2013, they
were rare. Wage labor also declined substantially, and the percentage of young men not in
the labor force—who usually were not married even in 1960—increased dramatically.
The final component is educational attainment. The relationship of education to
marriage has shifted substantially (Torr 2011). In 1960, high school graduates were more
often married than any other group, and those with education beyond college were the
least married. By 2013, the relationship between educational attainment and marriage was
strong and positive.
The decomposition shows the amount of change in marriage between 1960 and
2013 that can be attributed to compositional changes in each component. It is based on a
cross-classification of the percentage married for each combination of the four components
in each census year, a matrix of 2,240 cells. For each component, the analysis yields a
composition effect representing how much of the change is attributable to changes in the
distribution of that component, net of other components. The rate effect is the change in
marriage that is unaccounted for by changes in all four components (Das Gupta 1978).
The results appear in Table 2. The total change in the crude percentage of 25- to
29-year-old men married was 50.3, reflecting the drop from 74.5 % married to 24.2 %
married. The compositional effects for each component indicate how much of the change
would disappear if the socioeconomic composition of the young adult population had not
changed. The right column expresses the effects of each component as a percentage of
total change.
<Table 2 about here>
20
The first component—relative income—is the important one. If that distribution is
held constant over time, 40.6 % of the change disappears. Each of the other components
explains about 5 % of the change. Summing them, this simple analysis of four economic
components can account for 54 % of the overall decline in marriage.
This analysis omits many aspects of relative economic circumstances. For example,
we know that job insecurity has been increasing (Kalleberg 2011), but the decomposition
cannot capture that. We have information about current income and occupation, but
nothing about the perceived future prospects of workers, which must be less bright for
young men than they were 50 years ago. The census cannot tell whether young people
are optimistic about their prospects or whether their jobs are insecure. Moreover, the
decomposition analysis also does not account for the stagnating prospects of women
during this period. Thus, the real impact of declining economic opportunity is probably
even bigger than this decomposition suggests. The evidence therefore suggests that
Easterlin was broadly right about relative income: the decline of marriage since 1960 can
be largely explained by the deteriorating circumstances of young men compared with the
previous generation.13
13 I conducted a series of decompositions using a similar approach to assess the
difference in the percentage married between black and white men. The results suggest
that at least one-half of race differences in marriage in the 1960–2013 period can be
ascribed to race differences in the economic characteristics of young men, lending further
support to a structural interpretation (e.g., Wilson and Neckerman 1987).
21
The Decline of Wage Labor
Easterlin (1978, 1987) argued that the decline in relative wages for young men resulted
from generational competition. Figure 15 recreates the key graph from his 1978
Presidential Address to the Population Association of America, showing the number of
men aged 15–29 as a percentage of the number of men aged 30–64. Easterlin argued that
young men’s job prospects depended above all on how many of them were competing for
those jobs. Thus, he argued, the huge boom in relative income after WWII occurred
because young men were in short supply. As the Baby Boomers came of age, the number
of young men entering the labor force exploded. With the abundance of workers, the
golden age of postwar labor came to a screeching halt.
<Figure 15 about here>
Easterlin’s 1978 address came just after the peak of his graph. He could see that
generational competition was going to drop just as quickly as it had risen. Accordingly, he
predicted that a second golden age for young men’s employment was just around the
corner. By 1984, he argued, wages would be up, relative income would recover, marriage
age would decline sharply, and there would be a new baby boom.
As it turned out, the second golden age did not materialize. Despite the smaller
cohorts entering the job market after 1978, men’s wages continued to decline. One factor
was doubtless the mass entry of married women into the labor force, which partly
compensated for the smaller size of the new cohorts. Political change also affected youth
opportunities. Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, and America shifted to the
right. The fading of labor unions, decline in the minimum wage, globalization, outsourcing,
and stagnation of educational attainment all contributed to the dramatic decline of wages
22
for young men entering the labor force and the long stagnation of wages for young women
(Massey 1996; Piketty 2014; Stiglitz 2012; Weil 2014; Goldin and Katz 2010).
The largest source of decline of economic opportunity for young people, especially
over the past two decades and in future decades, may be the automation of both
manufacturing and services made possible by new technologies. The world’s computing
capacity is doubling every 18 months (Hilbert and Lopez 2011). Because of innovations in
artificial intelligence and sensing technology, robots are becoming increasingly flexible and
easier to train, and their cost is dropping rapidly (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014). New
technologies have eliminated millions of jobs over the past several decades, and they are
on the verge of eliminating many more (Frey and Osborne 2013).
From the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century, technological
innovation created more jobs than it destroyed. Indeed, the rise of wage labor—the driving
force of family change—was a direct consequence of technological innovation. When
Henry Ford introduced the moving automobile assembly line in 1914, it doubled
productivity (Ford and Crowther 1922). The assembly line threw a few carriage makers out
of work as people shifted to cars, but overall employment surged. With prices declining
steadily, car sales exploded. Employment at Ford’s Detroit area plants went from 14,000 in
1914 to 100,000 by 1926 (Ford and Crowther 1922; Segal 2005). There were also
hundreds of thousands of new jobs in automobile sales and service stations. This is a
perfect example of creative destruction, and similar processes occurred again and again
over the course of more than a century.
Today, mechanization seldom adds more jobs than it eliminates. Manufacturing
employment in the United States peaked in 1979 and declined 37 % over the next four
decades (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015); during the same period, manufacturing
23
output more than doubled (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System 2015).
These trends are not confined to the United States. Owing to productivity improvements,
employment in manufacturing is falling in most manufacturing countries, and worldwide
manufacturing employment is probably declining (Levinson 2015).
The rise of intelligent machines is also eliminating service jobs. Travel agents,
insurance agents, parking lot attendants, warehouse workers, and checkout clerks are
being replaced by machines. Within the next few decades, driving will be automated (IEEE
2014). This will eliminate some 7 million working-class jobs—from taxi drivers to truck
drivers—employing about 5 % of the nation’s workforce. Frey and Osborne (2013)
estimated that about one-half of the U.S. workforce is employed in jobs that are at high risk
of automation within the next decade or two, and another one-fifth have a moderate risk of
automation. They judged that only about one-third of jobs are reasonably safe. Eventually,
perhaps, just a few percent of the population may be sufficient to produce all the goods
and services society needs.
Figure 16 shows the percentage of men and women aged 18–64 who were
employed for wages since 1800, with extrapolations into the future. Male wage work went
up for 170 years, from 13 % in 1800 to a peak of 75 % in 1970. For the past four decades,
the percentage has declined, to 64 % by 2013.14 This decline is unprecedented. Suppose
14 Among the 36 % of working-age men who did not work for wages in 2013, 10 % were
enrolled in school or college; 11 % were in institutions; 15 % were unemployed; 24 % were
self-employed (down from 42 % in 1970); and 40 % were not in school, not employed, not
institutionalized, and not looking for a job (Ruggles et al. 2015).
24
that current trends were to continue. The dashed line for men in Fig.16 is simply a linear
extrapolation of the current trend, which has been roughly the same for four decades. If the
decline of male wage employment were to continue at the same pace over the next four
decades, only 44 % working-age men would have wage jobs by 2050.
<Figure 16 about here>
Among women, wage labor peaked in 2000. So far, the decline in wage labor has
been slower for women than for men. Because male wage work is declining so rapidly,
female wage employment will almost certainly exceed that of men within a few years. This
is partly because young women entering the labor force are increasingly better educated
than are young men (Goldin et al. 2006). In the long run, however, the disappearance of
jobs will affect women as well as men, and women’s employment will likely follow the same
trajectory. If current trends continue, however, only 56 % of working-age women will work
for wages by 2050.
For centuries, observers have been making dystopian predictions that technological
innovation would create massive unemployment and inequality, predictions that proved to
be false or at least premature (Mokyr et al. 2015). Is this time different? The past four
decades of decline in the relative income of the young might be only a temporary setback.
Easterlin could yet prove prescient: dramatic fertility decline across much of the globe is
creating very small cohorts, which might finally improve the prospects of young workers.
Perhaps some new technological innovation, as yet unimagined, will increase rather than
reduce the need for labor. It is equally possible, however, that the opportunities are not
coming back, and that we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the era of wage labor.
25
Wage Labor and Families
For thousands of years, corporate families provided the means of subsistence for most
people. Then, for about 130 years, wage labor opportunities grew rapidly, first among men
and then among women. The tectonic shifts in the structure of the economy since the early
nineteenth century transformed family relations. The transition from corporate families to
male breadwinner families was a consequence of the rise of male wage labor in the
Industrial Revolution. The transition from male breadwinner families to dual-earner families
reflects the massive increase in wage labor among married women following the Second
World War. The decline of corporate families led to a profound upheaval of generational
relations as family patriarchs lost control over their wage-earning sons. The decline of
male-breadwinner families led to an equally profound upheaval of gender relations as men
lost control over their wage-earning wives and daughters. The two great transformations of
family economies—from corporate to male breadwinner and from male breadwinner to
dual earner—undermined the economic logic of patriarchal authority.
The dramatic retreat from marriage over the past half-century could never have
occurred without the loss of patriarchal control and the shift in attitudes that accompanied
it. But the proximate cause of the retreat from marriage since 1975 is a different structural
change: the massive decline of relative earnings and falloff of wage labor participation
among young men, combined with the long stagnation in earnings among young women.
With growing inequality, families are facing diverging destinies (McLanahan 2004).
A minority of young people are faring well in the new economy, and young people with
resources are continuing to form marital and cohabiting unions. Among the college-
educated with good jobs, the impact of family change is muted. Marriage is still feasible;
marital instability is declining; and cohabitation and single parenthood can be managed
26
without hardship. For much of the population, however, the outlook is grim. Almost one-
fifth of young adults live in poverty, more than double the percentage in 1973 (Ruggles et
al. 2015). More than 10 % of young earners have their wages garnished because of debt,
often for child support (Arnold and Keil 2014). Many who have jobs are underemployed,
taking unskilled and part-time jobs even if they have good qualifications. Among young
people who lack resources, families are difficult to form or sustain: fewer and fewer young
adults are marrying, and those who do are at increasing risk of divorce. For people without
secure jobs that provide a living wage, cohabitating unions are highly unstable. Whether
cohabiting or not, most unmarried mothers of infants are in poverty (Amato et al. 2014;
Carbone and Cahn 2014; Cherlin 2014; Flood et al. 2015).
Despite these challenges, few would choose to return to the families of the past.
Patriarchy has receded; today’s families are far more humane and egalitarian than
anything that came before. Corporal punishment of wives is universally condemned, and
wife-beating is illegal in every state. Child-beating is still legal in the United States, but
even in Texas, it is no longer acceptable to punish a child with a switch (Zinser 2014).
Women are no longer legally subordinate to their husbands. Wives can work for wages,
they can keep their earnings, and they no longer need their husband’s permission to open
a checking account or sign a contract. There is growing tolerance of new family forms, to
the point where same-sex marriage is now legal throughout the United States. Time-use
data show that families are becoming more and more egalitarian with respect to
housework and childcare (Goldscheider et al. 2015).
If the era of ever-expanding wage labor is truly drawing to a close, that will create
new challenges for families, but it will also create new opportunities. For the last 10,000
years, most of humanity has been forced to work long hours in repetitive and backbreaking
27
toil just to earn basic subsistence. We are on the verge of being able to make everything
we need, including all kinds of things unimagined by previous generations, without that
kind of tedious and grueling drudgery—indeed, with hardly any work at all. Our silicon
servants will have the potential to provide everyone with food, shelter, and all other
necessities, freeing us to pursue our dreams and passions.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay on “The Economic Possibilities for
our Grandchildren.” He predicted that the combination of technological innovation and
capital accumulation will eventually solve the problem of material needs. Keynes argued
that “the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a
hundred years” (Keynes 1930:96). Eighty-five years after this prediction, I believe we are
already within sight of solving the economic problem. We now must address what Keynes
saw as the real problem: how “to live wisely and agreeably and well” (Keynes 1930:97).
To make families stronger, reduce family instability, enable young people to form
marital or cohabiting unions, and eliminate child poverty, we must figure out how to share
the bounty of the machines. Our biggest challenge is not how to produce wealth but how to
distribute it: how to get money into the hands of people—especially young people—so that
they can buy all those goods and services that the robots can produce with so little human
effort.
28
Acknowledgments This article is a revised version of my Presidential Address to the
Population Association of America, delivered in San Diego on May 1, 2015. Funding for
data preparation was provided by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child
Health and Human Development (R01HD43392, R01HD047283, and R24HD41023). I also
had a lot of help from my friends. I presented versions of this article at 10 population center
seminars and conferences, and at every venue received feedback that reshaped my
thinking. Several people were extraordinarily generous, providing detailed critiques of
multiple drafts: Philip Cohen, Stephanie Coontz, Cathy Fitch, Katie Genadek, Claudia
Goldin, Fran Goldscheider, Miriam King, Steven Mintz, Phyllis Moen, Lisa Norling, Gina
Rumore, Carole Shammas, and Matt Sobek. My greatest debt is to the data creators,
curators, integrators, and disseminators of the Minnesota Population Center, without whom
it would be impossible to describe long-run family change.
29
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Fig. 1 Percentage of persons aged 65 or older residing in multigenerational families: United States, 1850–2013. Multigenerational families defined according to the IPUMS MULTGEN variable. Source: Ruggles et al. (2015)
0.00
10.00
20.00
30.00
40.00
50.00
60.00
70.00
80.00
1850 1870 1890 1910 1930 1950 1970 1990 2010
Perc
ent m
ultig
ener
atio
nal
1
Fig. 2 Annual divorces per 1,000 married women, standardized by age: United States, 1867–2013. Source: Ruggles (forthcoming)
0
5
10
15
20
1865 1885 1905 1925 1945 1965 1985 2005
2
Fig. 3 Percentage of women never married by aged 40–44 by birth cohort: U.S. women born 1825–1994. Source: Ruggles (forthcoming)
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
Perc
ent n
ever
-mar
ried
by 4
0-44
Year of Birth
Observed
Predicted
3
Fig. 4 Family economies of U.S. couples aged 18–64: United States, 1800–2010. Source: Ruggles (forthcoming)
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Corporate Family
Male Breadwinner Dual Earner
Female Breadwinner
4
Fig. 5 Occupations of men aged 18–64: United States, 1850–2010. Source: Ruggles (forthcoming)
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
1850 1870 1890 1910 1930 1950 1970 1990 2010
Farmer & other self-employed
Unpaid family work
Skilled & operatives
Unskilled wage work
Professional & managerial
Clerical & sales
Slave
Not in labor force
5
Fig. 6 Agricultural employment and multigenerational families: United States, 1800–2010. Source: Ruggles et al. (2015), Weiss (1992)
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
Multigenerational families(persons age 65+)
Agriculturalemployment
(male labor force)
6
Fig. 7 Occupations of women aged 18–64: United States, 1850–1910. Source: Ruggles (forthcoming)
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
1850 1870 1890 1910 1930 1950 1970 1990 2010Farmer & self-employed
Unpaid work in family enterprise
Skilled & operatives
Unskilled wage work
Professional & managerial
Clerical & sales
Unskilled
Unskilled
Slave
Not in labor force
7
Fig. 8 Percentage of women aged 25–29 engaged in wage labor, by marital status: United States, 1860–2013. Source: Ruggles (forthcoming)
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Unmarried women
Married women
All Women
8
Fig. 9 Labor force participation and attitudes toward labor force participation: Married women under age 45: United States, 1930–2013. Sources: Ruggles et al. (2015), Flood et al. (2015), Westoff and Ryder (n.d.), and Smith et al. (2013)
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Percent of wives disagreeing:"It is much better for everyone
involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and
the woman takes care of the home and family."
Percent of wives in labor force
9
Fig. 10 Percentage of households without a married couple: United States, 1850–2013. Source: Ruggles et al. (2015)
0
10
20
30
40
50
1850 1870 1890 1910 1930 1950 1970 1990 2010
10
Fig. 11 Median age at first marriage, 1850–2013. Source: Ruggles (forthcoming)
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Men
Women
Year of Marriage
11
Fig. 12 Median wages for persons aged 25–29, 1940–2013. Sources: Ruggles et al. (2015) and Flood et al. (2015)
$0
$10,000
$20,000
$30,000
$40,000
$50,000
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Men
Women
$0
$10,000
$20,000
$30,000
$40,000
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Women
Men
A. Full-time wage and salary
B. All persons aged 25–29
12
Fig. 13 Median wage income as a percentage of median wage income in the previous generation (30 years previously): U.S. men aged 25–29, 1945–2013. Sources: Ruggles et al. (2015), Flood et al. (2015), and Alvaredo et al. (2015)
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
400
1945 1955 1965 1975 1985 1995 2005 2015
13
Fig. 14 Median wage income as a percentage of the income of the top 1 %: U.S. men aged 25–29, 1940–2013. Sources: Ruggles et al. (2015), Flood et al. (2015), and Alvaredo et al. (2015)
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
14
Fig. 15 Number of men age 15 to 29 as a percentage of the number of men age 30–64. Sources: Ruggles et al. (2015) and Flood et al. (2015)
40
45
50
55
60
65
70
75
1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
15
Fig. 16 The rise and fall of wage labor: percentage of persons aged 18–64 engaged in wage and salary work, by sex: 1800–2050. Source: Ruggles et al. (2015)
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
1800 1830 1860 1890 1920 1950 1980 2010 2040
Men
Women
16
Table 1 Percentage currently married with spouse present and distribution of characteristics by selected factors: U.S.-born men aged 25–29, 1960 and 2013
% Married Population Distribution
1960 2013 1960 2013 Relative Income (percentiles of combined
data sets) 0–9 18.9 7.0 3.9 13.0 10–19 35.1 11.0 2.1 14.2 20–29 45.5 16.8 2.7 11.8 30–39 47.9 21.4 2.2 12.6 40–49 51.6 29.1 2.1 14.6 50–59 59.4 35.6 4.1 13.1 60–69 68.4 38.5 9.8 11.9 70–79 76.4 39.8 21.2 5.8 80–89 82.8 43.0 24.4 2.0 90–99 87.6 42.5 27.5 1.1
Occupation Professional, technical 74.2 29.7 14.2 18.4 Managers, clerical 76.4 24.0 16.7 21.2 Sales 77.2 22.7 6.0 6.0 Crafts 79.8 35.2 23.9 14.0 Operatives 79.4 27.2 22.7 11.3 Service and laborers 66.2 18.5 13.8 21.5 No occupation for 5+ years 10.6 4.9 2.6 7.7
Employment Characteristics Self-employed 83.3 32.7 6.6 3.0 Employed for wages 78.2 28.6 83.8 74.4 Unemployed 53.5 10.7 3.6 8.2 Not in the labor force 24.6 7.9 5.9 14.4
Education Less than high school 73.0 15.5 38.1 7.6 High school graduate 76.4 23.7 47.1 65.7 College graduate 73.9 26.7 8.9 21.1 Postgraduate 69.7 33.3 5.9 5.5
Total 74.5 24.2 100.0 100.0 Number of Men Aged 25–29 in Samples 46,708 74,095
17
Table 2 Components of change in the percentage married: U.S.-born men aged 25–29, 1960–2013
Components of Change
Index of Change
Total Change in Marriage 50.3 100.0 Effects of Compositional Factors
Relative Income 20.4 40.6 Occupation 2.2 4.4 Employment characteristics 2.9 5.7 Education 1.6 3.2
Combined Effect of Factors 27.1 53.9 Rate Effect 23.2 46.1